Baltimore Sun Union Members OK Contract

Published 8:00 pm, Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Union members at The Sun voted to accept the newspaper's latest four-year contract offer by a 3-to-1 margin, although many said they accepted the terms because they didn't think they had much choice.

Members of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild voted 319-102 in favor of the offer Tuesday night, less than an hour before the previous contract expired. Union members said tough economic times forced them to consider the difficulty of mounting an effective strike.

"I think people sort of realized that if we fought on in any way, it was going to be a very, very difficult fight with no promise of any form of victory at the end," said Michael Hill, a Sun reporter and member of the guild's bargaining committee.

The contract covers reporters, graphic artists, photographers, some advertising sales employees and janitors who work at The Sun, which has 1,300 employees.

The newspaper published its first Wednesday edition more than three hours early; the paper said it was to let workers attend the union vote. It carried bylines for many photographers and reporters, which staffers had withheld for nine days.

Hard feelings were evident shortly after the vote. Some members threw copies of the contract to the ground outside the entrance to the newspaper building after they left the meeting two blocks away. And the guild issued a statement saying the company negotiated in bad faith and it was accepting the contract "under bitter protest."

"I think that The Sun is going to be hurt by this entire thing," said graphic designer Jay Selway, who voted against the contract. "I think the workers are going to be hurt."

But Charles Fancher, a Sun spokesman who took part in the negotiations, called the vote a "victory for the entire newspaper." He said the contract was the right one for an increasingly complex media marketplace.

The contract includes management demands for a one-year wage freeze, a new merit-pay plan and the flexibility to transfer workers to new jobs, such as turning a reporter into a copy editor. But the newspaper extended the notification period for transfers from one week to 30 days. And in the final days of negotiations, management dropped a plan that would have allowed layoffs of new hires on the basis of their performance rather than seniority.

The newspaper also increased the amount of raises in the later years of the contract and offered a $1,500 contract-signing bonus.

Fancher said employees would get weekly raises of $24, $10 and $10 in the second, third and fourth years of the contract. Additional money would be placed in a pool from which merit raises would come.

A top-scale reporter at the paper earned $1,093 a week under the old pact, Fancher said.

Chicago-based Tribune Co. acquired The Sun three years ago. The newspaper is the 29th largest daily U.S. newspaper, according to Editor & Publisher. It has a daily circulation of 306,799 and a Sunday circulation of 466,916.